Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/158

 CHAPTER XIII

The Suppression of Liberty

N December of 1917 there was established in Russia for the protection of the Revolution and "to carry on the merciless struggle against those trying to overthrow the Soviet system; against sabotage, banditage and espionage and speculation" an organisation known as the Extraordinary Commission. It has an Advisory Board of fifteen persons, all members of the Communist party. Its head and chief is a man named Dserzhinsky, a fanatical Communist whose adoration of Lenin is notorious. He is assisted in his work, according to the Vice-President, with whom we had an interview, by a definite staff of four thousand five hundred persons, estimated by others who were present on this occasion at a number enormously greater than that. These assistants consider it their duty to arrest all whose actions appear to them to be inimical to the welfare of the Communist State.

This great army of spies and police agents, largely the same men as served the Czar's régime, 154